Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Candy slid off the edge of the altar and by the time the soles of her feet were on the ground the clatter of conflict died away almost entirely. She looked up. Her father was turning, his eyes already fixed upon her. Candy couldn’t make any sense of the string of curses he then unleashed, but there was no doubting the raging fury that fueled them. Bill drew back his right arm, at belly level, to the side of his body, his hand raised, palm out, fingers bent. He made a quick counterclockwise flick of his wrist, then reversed the motion. As a result, the overturned chairs that lay between father and daughter divided. The chairs squealed on the polished boards and were whipped away by an invisible force, thrown up and over one another by the power of Bill’s gesture.

There were shrieks from several of the minister’s flock (the shrillest from Mr. Elliot) as they apparently decided that they’d witnessed quite enough for one day. They started to walk, then race toward the front door. They weren’t fast enough. Bill turned his back on the altar and threw the force of his attention at the exits. Candy did not know if he made another gesture or if it was simply his will that caused the huge doors to slam shut and the bolts to slide noisily home to seal the contract.

Norma Lipnik had been closest to the doors when they closed. Now, shaken by the noise, she retreated from the entrance, calling to her minister as she did so.

“Please, Reverend!” she said, putting on the warm, unflustered voice she always used when things went awry at the hotel, “I really have to go.”

“It doesn’t work that way, woman!”

“But you don’t understand . . .”

That’s it, Candy thought, keep talking, Norma. Every second that Norma Lipnik wasted distracting Bill Quackenbush was another second Candy could devote to figuring out how to undo the theft of her treasured knowledge.

She stumbled, her legs weak and aching, around the altar to the device itself. The phials that contained her memories seemed to already know that she intended to reclaim them, as though some tenuous thread of thought between her mind and these stolen experiences still existed. The substance in the phials—was it liquid or gaseous? Perhaps both—sensed her proximity and it raced around the glass. It had been colorless, but it had darkened in its agitated state, until it was the purple-gray of a thunderhead, in the belly of which multicolored lightning rods bloomed.

She was still staring at it in dazed wonder when she heard the voice of her father from across the church: “If you touch my machine, I’ll kill you where you stand!”

Chapter 32

Sacrilege

CANDY LOOKED BACK AT her father, just in time to see him conjure a trinity of thin, silver-tipped arrows. With their silver tips glinting, they flew at her and she felt a nauseating tug in her belly, as though they were homing in on her innards.

She let them get to the other side of the altar before she made her move, forcing her less-than-eager legs to shift her out of their path at the very last moment. The needles were too close to change direction, and struck at the spot where she had been standing seconds before. The first needle hit the middle of the device, causing an arc of yellow-green lightning to leap from it, while the other two struck the phials causing a few of them to explode instantly. Their contents emptied like flowering clouds, the colors they contained suddenly blazing like glorious fires. They returned instantly to their owner, performing a celebration dance of liberation by circling Candy three or four times, then without warning, leaping back into her.

Oh, the bliss of that! The unadulterated joy of being reunited with herself. Her head was like a pail into which a dam was pouring its contents, images that she had forgotten she’d owned blazing for a tiny perfect instant in her mind’s eye before another came to show its beauty to her. A bird, a tower, a slave, a face, ten faces, a thousand faces, a moon in a tree, a glass of water, a wave, a tear, a laughing moth, her mom, Ricky, Don, Diamanda, Carrion, the Dead Man’s House, the Yebba Dim Day, a bottle of rum, Kaspar, Malingo—oh, Malingo, Malingo, Malingo—

k

She was laughing now, in her sleep, and saying his name.

“Malingo! Malingo! Malingo!”

“I think the worst might be over,” Geneva said cautiously.

“Let’s hope so,” said John Mischief. “Because my heart can’t take much more of this.”

“Your heart?” said John Drowze. “What about mine?”

His complaint started them all going.

“—and mine!”

“—and me!”

“Shut your nattering traps!” said Two-Toed Tom. “It isn’t over till it’s over.”

Candy threw her will against the other phials. There was no anger in it. The pleasure of the reunion had washed her clean, and her cleanliness gave the blows greater force. All but one of the phials blew, and Candy’s memories and meditations, prayers, dreams, and revelations, came back to her in all their chaotic, glorious, profusion.

“You stupid cow!” her father yelled.

He surged at the mass of obstacles between them—both chairs and people—sweeping them aside. Then he came at her. She could see on his face what he intended. He wasn’t going to trust magic to punish her. It was apparent that he intended to deal with her the old-fashioned way—with his hands. He was coming at her quickly too. Moving much faster than expected, given his beer gut and his lumbering gait. His face was beet red with fury, his gritted teeth yellowish, the color and light in his eyes completely extinguished, leaving two black slits, without so much as a highlight to relieve their eerie veracity.

Keeping her gaze fixed on him she fumbled for the final phial, and pulling it out of its holder she lifted it above her head and with all the strength her beleaguered limbs could muster, she threw it to the ground at her feet. There was a satisfying noise of breaking glass erased almost immediately by a soft whump as the contents burst into a ball of smoke and flowers, doubling its size with every passing second, spitting out riotous smears of color that graciously curved upward until they were a few feet from their source, and climbed at a giddy speed to explode a second time when they struck the ceiling. There was a loud, sharp crack, followed by several splintering sounds, as one of the support beams cracked. Globs of white plaster dropped to the floor where they shattered.

“How dare you!” Bill said, his tone so ludicrously theatrical she almost laughed. “This is sacred ground.”

Candy let the thoughts from the final phial, having burst against the ceiling, come down into her. She was almost complete. She had her memories back, but she was running out of tricks. Under her breath, she muttered, “Diamanda, if you can hear me . . . please help . . .”

On the shores of the Twenty-Fifth Hour, walking with her sometime husband, the love of her life (and afterlife)—the once-pitiful ghost in Room Nineteen, Henry Murkitt—Diamanda heard her name called. She recognized the voice instantly.

“Candy’s calling me,” she said. “We have to go. She’s in danger.”

Bill lunged and caught hold of Candy. His hands were huge and heavy, as though he had lead for bones. He struck her across the face.

Almost as a reflex, Candy channeled her shock and turned her thoughts from her father’s twisted face to something even less pleasant: the Fever Gibe, one of the Beasts of Efreet, leaning up on its back legs, the purple- blue spines on its hide standing on end. She cast the image out into the air behind her father, continuing to add details to it as she did so. Its forelimbs with their razor claws. And worse, its head, which opened like a grotesque flower with but one petal, red and moist, which spread and stretched, uncaging the vast tooth-lined maw at its